The Designer S Guide To Verilog Ams

The Verilog Hardware Description Language (Verilog-HDL) has long been the most popular language for describing complex digital hardware. It started life as a prop- etary language but was donated by Cadence Design Systems to the design community to serve as the basis of an open standard. That standard was formalized in 1995 by the IEEE in standard 1364-1995. About that same time a group named Analog Verilog International formed with the intent of proposing extensions to Verilog to support analog and mixed-signal simulation. The first fruits of the labor of that group became available in 1996 when the language definition of Verilog-A was released. Verilog-A was not intended to work directly with Verilog-HDL. Rather it was a language with Similar syntax and related semantics that was intended to model analog systems and be compatible with SPICE-class circuit simulation engines. The first implementation of Verilog-A soon followed: a version from Cadence that ran on their Spectre circuit simulator. As more implementations of Verilog-A became available, the group defining the a- log and mixed-signal extensions to Verilog continued their work, releasing the defi- tion of Verilog-AMS in 2000. Verilog-AMS combines both Verilog-HDL and Verilog-A, and adds additional mixed-signal constructs, providing a hardware description language suitable for analog, digital, and mixed-signal systems. Again, Cadence was first to release an implementation of this new language, in a product named AMS Designer that combines their Verilog and Spectre simulation engines.

The Verilog Hardware Description Language (Verilog-HDL) has long been the most popular language for describing complex digital hardware. It started life as a prop- etary language but was donated by Cadence Design Systems to the design community to serve as the basis of an open standard. That standard was formalized in 1995 by the IEEE in standard 1364-1995. About that same time a group named Analog Verilog International formed with the intent of proposing extensions to Verilog to support analog and mixed-signal simulation. The first fruits of the labor of that group became available in 1996 when the language definition of Verilog-A was released. Verilog-A was not intended to work directly with Verilog-HDL. Rather it was a language with Similar syntax and related semantics that was intended to model analog systems and be compatible with SPICE-class circuit simulation engines. The first implementation of Verilog-A soon followed: a version from Cadence that ran on their Spectre circuit simulator. As more implementations of Verilog-A became available, the group defining the a- log and mixed-signal extensions to Verilog continued their work, releasing the defi- tion of Verilog-AMS in 2000. Verilog-AMS combines both Verilog-HDL and Verilog-A, and adds additional mixed-signal constructs, providing a hardware description language suitable for analog, digital, and mixed-signal systems. Again, Cadence was first to release an implementation of this new language, in a product named AMS Designer that combines their Verilog and Spectre simulation engines.

Engineering productivity in integrated circuit product design and - velopment today is limited largely by the effectiveness of the CAD tools used. For those domains of product design that are highly dependent on transistor-level circuit design and optimization, such as high-speed logic and memory, mixed-signal analog-digital int- faces, RF functions, power integrated circuits, and so forth, circuit simulation is perhaps the single most important tool. As the complexity and performance of integrated electronic systems has increased with scaling of technology feature size, the capabilities and sophistication of the underlying circuit simulation tools have correspondingly increased. The absolute size of circuits requiring transistor-level simulation has increased dramatically, creating not only problems of computing power resources but also problems of task organization, complexity management, output representation, initial condition setup, and so forth. Also, as circuits of more c- plexity and mixed types of functionality are attacked with simu- tion, the spread between time constants or event time scales within the circuit has tended to become wider, requiring new strategies in simulators to deal with large time constant spreads.

SystemVerilog is a rich set of extensions to the IEEE 1364-2001 Verilog Hardware Description Language (Verilog HDL). These extensions address two major aspects of HDL based design. First, modeling very large designs with concise, accurate, and intuitive code. Second, writing high-level test programs to efficiently and effectively verify these large designs. This book, SystemVerilog for Design, addresses the first aspect of the SystemVerilog extensions to Verilog. Important modeling features are presented, such as two-state data types, enumerated types, user-defined types, structures, unions, and interfaces. Emphasis is placed on the proper usage of these enhancements for simulation and synthesis. A companion to this book, SystemVerilog for Verification, covers the second aspect of SystemVerilog.

This book is structured as a step-by-step course of study along the lines of a VLSI integrated circuit design project. The entire Verilog language is presented, from the basics to everything necessary for synthesis of an entire 70,000 transistor, full-duplex serializer-deserializer, including synthesizable PLLs. The author includes everything an engineer needs for in-depth understanding of the Verilog language: Syntax, synthesis semantics, simulation and test. Complete solutions for the 27 labs are provided in the downloadable files that accompany the book. For readers with access to appropriate electronic design tools, all solutions can be developed, simulated, and synthesized as described in the book. A partial list of design topics includes design partitioning, hierarchy decomposition, safe coding styles, back annotation, wrapper modules, concurrency, race conditions, assertion-based verification, clock synchronization, and design for test. A concluding presentation of special topics includes System Verilog and Verilog-AMS.

This textbook provides a starter’s guide to Verilog, to be used in conjunction with a one-semester course in Digital Systems Design, or on its own for readers who only need an introduction to the language. This book is designed to match the way the material is actually taught in the classroom. Topics are presented in a manner which builds foundational knowledge before moving onto advanced topics. The author has designed the presentation with learning goals and assessment at its core. Each section addresses a specific learning outcome that the student should be able to “do” after its completion. The concept checks and exercise problems provide a rich set of assessment tools to measure student performance on each outcome. Written the way the material is taught, enabling a bottom-up approach to learning which culminates with a high-level of learning, with a solid foundation; Emphasizes examples from which students can learn: contains a solved example for nearly every section in the book; Includes more than 200 exercise problems, as well as concept check questions for each section, tied directly to specific learning outcomes.